Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Thursday, July 19, 2012

AffinityLive Review

Technology is moving fast, and in business, those that keep up are usually the big guys with fat purses. The small and cash-strapped ones, unfortunately, are stuck with outdated technology from the 1990s, like Excel and Access, for the basic work to get done. This doesn’t do much for productivity, and in this fast-paced environment businesses find themselves competing in, efficiency is what clinches the deal. While SAP and Oracle have long been providing enterprise solutions to tackle this problem, their costs are way too high for small businesses that might not even need the complex solutions these software innovators offer.

To address this pent-up demand in the professional services sector (independent contractors and consultants rendering unique or technical functions such as accountants, appraisers, recruiters, researchers, translators, medical centers, law firms, etc.), Geoff McQueen, a serial entrepreneur with an engineering background, founded AffinityLive.com, a startup based in San Francisco. AffinityLive allows you to manage your data and work in the cloud, providing an integrated end-to-end solution from prospecting to payment.

Aside from the centralization of multiple manual tasks, AffinityLive includes interactive work scheduling that gives you an overall feel for how busy your team is on a given day and whether you’re all geared up to meet a deadline. It also has an intelligent e-mail capture and indexing feature that automatically captures client e-mails, including attachments, from different inboxes and indexes them in a searchable repository linked to projects, sales, tasks or any pertinent part of the system.

With AffinityLive, workflow and business processes are dynamic and structured but not too structured to thwart the overall receptivity and creativeness of your people. Integrated with Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange, your meetings and appointments are forwarded to your calendar, whether that’s on your desktop, your mobile phone or your web-based browser. And with social integration like Twitter, LinkedIn and Yammer, managing your business has never been easier.

AffinityLive comes in three price packages. Boutique starts at $49 per month for two professionals. Team is priced at $119 monthly for five professionals, and Company is tagged at $249 a month for ten professionals. For every additional professional, just add $29 to the monthly subscription fee. You can even try AffinityLive absolutely free for 30 days. No credit card requirement, you’re sure to be up and running in a matter of minutes.